The janitor who changed the world of science

thanks to curiositystream and nebula for sponsoring this video let me start by saying that generally individuals don't matter in the history of science the history of science is a history of big social and economic and technological factors though of course sometimes an individual does arise out of that big picture people like einstein james clerk maxwell but those individuals normally follow a pattern they're from a wealthy background their family normally has some kind of training in or connection to science fairy tale rags to riches stories just don't exist except of course sometimes very rarely they do like the janitor turned international scientist james kroll but before telling you his story let me set the scene it's the 19th century science as we know it is in the process of being born in particular scientists are starting to realize that our planet looked very different in the past geologists are uncovering evidence that snow and ice had previously thousands of years ago covered all of europe in what was being called the ice age at the time the scientific consensus was that the earth was still gradually cooling from its formation so this idea of the earth being colder in the past was quite revolutionary the question of how the earth could have a period of intense cold in its deep past was an open one it was largely investigated at institutions like universities and scientific societies like the royal society in london these institutions often trace back their roots for hundreds of years but it was really in the 19th century that they became the place to do research that meant that if you couldn't get access to one of these institutions then you were largely shut out from cutting-edge research one such institution was the andesonian university in glasgow which is now part of strathclyde university in 1859 it got a new janitor james kroll was born in 1821 to a very poor crofting family in perthshire in scotland and he was born with the front part of his skull not properly formed and he'd be plagued by this disability and general ill health for his entire life when he was old enough to go to school he actually refused to go initially because he was worried that the other children would laugh at him for the unusual shape of his head he didn't go for several years and when he eventually did go and hated it it was only a couple of years before the family called him back to work on the farm because they were struggling to make ends meet all this is to say that he ended up being largely self-educated and in particular a magazine namely the penny magazine of the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge wow sparked an interesting crowl in science unfortunately though there was no way for krell to follow up on this interest because he was very poor and there were no opportunities for very poor people to get further education but his meager source of income the family farm eventually became unsustainable and he had to leave to get another job and for several years kroll scraped by working whatever job he could he was a joiner he worked on a newspaper he sold insurance he ran a hotel but in all of these things he was incredibly unlucky things just kept happening to him that meant he had to leave his jobs often it was his physical health that would just fail him and he'd have to leave and find something new by 1859 kroll is nearly 40 he's desperately poor he's struggling to feed himself and now he's a wife and he's constantly unwell he's physically frail having been kicked from job to job to job he has this dream of following science but no way to make that dream a reality but he gets the break of a lifetime when he lands a job as a janitor he's paid one pound a week to clean the library at the andersonian university well actually him and his brother are paid to clean the library and it's unclear how much of the cleaning james actually did because inspired by years of reading the penny magazine kroll took this opportunity to devour the contents of the library he taught himself the latest theories in mathematics and physics and geology and astronomy and eventually started corresponding with the authors of those theories not fan mail but critiquing their work and he engaged in a level playing field intellectual debate with people like charles darwin and lord kelvin and john tyndall and it became clear that all along cross had this unbelievable mind the thing that he seemed particularly interested in though was the cause of this newly discovered ice age and he thought presumably while sweeping the floor or cleaning windows that the french mathematician josef ademar was on the right lines when he suggested that variations in the earth's orbit around the sun were responsible for the ice age because the earth's orbit isn't exactly circular it's elliptical or a squashed circle you may recall that the earth is also tilted in its orbit meaning that one hemisphere is more exposed to the sun for half the year than the other causing the seasons now adama argued that if the northern hemisphere's summer corresponded with when the earth was closest in its elliptical orbit to the sun its summer would be particularly hot and its winter particularly cold and vice versa the southern hemisphere summer would be colder and it's winter warmer as the earth goes around the sun over and over again though the direction its axis points in changes very slowly and eventually those rolls will be flipped with the southern hemisphere having hotter summers and colder winters it's summer lining up with the closest approach of the earth to the sun and of course the opposite for the northern hemisphere this changing of roles happens on a regular cycle that's tens of thousands of years long and it's also moderated and varied by several other complicated bits of orbital mechanics kroll hypothesized that this orbital variation was responsible for the ice age he claimed that when a hemisphere's winter was particularly cold more snow would fall and so over hundreds and thousands of years that snow would be compacted into ice sheets that would cover the landscape an ice age crucially he also realized that the more snow that falls on the ground and the more ice that forms in the sea the more reflective the earth becomes reducing the amount of energy that it absorbs from the sun cooling it even further cooling an already cooler earth that would then lead to more snow that would then lead to more reflection and even more cooling and so on what we would today call a positive ice albedo feedback loop so those orbital variations didn't even need to be that big in order to produce huge changes in climate enough to cause ice ages yes ice age is plural krell figured that this was a regular cycle and so it would cause regular ice ages despite the fact there was no evidence at that time for that being the case but he trusted his mats this theory was fantastic it was truly brilliant and kroll was acclaimed by the great scientists of his day people like darwin but unfortunately there was no way to know if he was right or not the experimental techniques to prove or disprove his theories hadn't even been imagined yet regardless kroll was given an official academic post allowing him to hang up his broom and for the first time in his life he was able to live comfortably because he'd made it he'd made it to the inner echelons of science to one of these institutions where research was done and he was accepted and respected by his peers but sadly this wasn't to last after a brief hard-won career in academia kroll's health failed him again and he felt compelled to resign and in fact retire in poverty once more until his death and while he was lauded in his lifetime within a few decades of his death he'd been mostly forgotten as had his theory in fact the few academics who did remember the theory basically dismissed it out of hand until a far most famous name in this field came along the serbian militant milankovic milankovic extended kroll's mathematics and corrected a mistake in them because it's actually summers being colder when the summer hemisphere is further from the sun that prevents ice melt that leads to an ice age not winters being even colder and because of these developments the theory became known as milankovitch cycles and when eventually in the 1970s techniques were invented that could establish past temperatures from ocean sediment cores it was milankovich's theory that was proven correct his mathematics neatly lined up with a bunch of ice ages throughout earth's history and so it's his name not unjustly that was associated with this theory the variations in the earth's orbit around the sun forced its climate but perhaps we should be calling them kroll milankovitch cycles because james kroll laid the foundations of the theory and he made the crucial realization that feedback loops on earth would amplify any forcing from orbital variations his genius was recognized in his lifetime one obituary claimed every honest scientific investigator will admit that kroll's writings have had the most radical influence on cosmological speculation in certain directions his influence has been nearly as great as that of darwin's in biology none of this is to take away from milankovitch's work which was also brilliant all i'm saying is that i think james kroll should be better known he's one of the thousands of men and women throughout history who were links in the chain of scientific knowledge but weren't the last link and so just haven't been remembered he overcame incredible odds and swam against the tides of economics and social mobility of the time to become one of these remarkable men one of these incredible stories a fairy tale in the history of science may i present to you possibly the greatest janitor the world has ever known james kroll remember him the story of the earth is a dramatic one it's a story of ice and fire and collisions and creation and destruction the very ground beneath my feet right now is only here because of hundreds of millions of years of violence it's a story told in 300 million years actually it's more like an hour and a half a documentary on the formation of the continent of europe one of the thousands of documentaries on curiosity stream if you fancy expanding your horizons with expertly crafted and curated documentaries on your lunch breaks or in the evenings curiosity stream is perfect for you rather than re-watching friends again why not learn about kurdistan or african art or coffee or bees or perhaps you prefer something indie like this video perhaps you'd like to watch more videos like this without any adverts in them at all from a variety of educational content creators perhaps you'd even like to watch exclusive content like lindsey ellis analyzing how tropic thunder changed hollywood well you're in luck because that's nebula the thoughtful educational streaming platform that's partnered up with curiosity stream if you go to curiositystream.com simon clark you get access to the best of both worlds the high production value documentaries on curiosity stream and the indie videos on nebula and better yet with this bundle you get a 26 discount on a subscription to curiosity stream less than 15 a year but that's not all with this bundle you directly support educational creators like me and you help support the development of online educational video by allowing creators like me to take risks and do things that aren't necessarily algorithm friendly that's curiositystream.com simonclark to access both curiosity stream and nebula and get that 26 discount thanks to all of you who have already signed up to this bundle and thank you to curiositystream for sponsoring this video i really hope that you enjoyed this video i found out about kroll when i was researching my book you can pre-order it now link in the description and as soon as i heard his story i just knew that i had to make a video about him and his incredible life story if you'd like to learn more details about his life then please do check out this fantastic talk by mike robinson of the royal scottish geographical society which goes into way more detail than i could fit into this video and it was a really useful resource for putting together the video if you'd like to watch some more stuff by me then here's some recommended doing next if you did enjoy the video please do pop it a like and share it with people that you think might find it interesting as well thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 149,087

Rating: 4.9401121 out of 5

Keywords: drsimonclark, dr simon clark, simonoxfphys, simonoxphys

Id: IhgQxCVlaYQ

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021